Cloud contact center service 3CLogic announced enhancements to its reporting and scripting features with its 5.0 software release. "To have these [features] seamlessly integrated, and part of [a] core product, is what we didn't see in the industry," says Robert Killory, chief customer officer at 3CLogic. Besides the announcement of Athena Reporting and the Iris Scripting Engine, the release also includes a number of tweaks to existing features implemented as a result of customer feedback.

With the Athena Reporting, "we wanted to eliminate constraints on data volumes and open up analytics to the contact center," Killory explains. The BI-level reporting "empowers the call centers, so they can get what they need without coming back to us if they have someone in house that knows the business side [but] just needs the tools." Athena Reporting allows for more complex analysis than before, with additional granularity and comparison abilities. For example, a user could look at the percentage of sales made according to lead source, and compare or average them to other lead sources. Reports can be created and saved using a drag-and-drop interface. Customers can also export their data or even store it in their data warehouse, though the majority of 3CLogic's small and medium-sized customers don't use data warehouses. For that reason, the Web-based BI tool will allow for more complex reporting than most of 3CLogic's customers have had access to. The Athena Reporting tool is built on top of an Apache Cassandra framework, "designed for big data and handling massive amounts of information," Killory says.

3CLogic's new product release also contains updates to empower contact center managers at the call center to make changes to scripts directly, again without having to turn to someone else to implement the changes for them. They can create dynamic branching that will trigger certain scripts based on the response of the person they're calling. If a new script isn't working, they can quickly change it or test another option. Or, if a company is pushing a new initiative, they can easily insert that information to respond agilely to changing business requirements. Information from these calls is also auto-updated either in one of the more than 15 CRM systems 3CLogic integrates with or back to the original data source.

Besides the introduction of more complex BI reporting and self-service changes to scripting, 3CLogic made changes to make the user experience even smoother. The "whisper" feature, which allows supervisors to listen, coach, or jump into a call, has improved the ability of supervisors to instruct an agent without the person on the other line hearing. Incoming call information can be displayed in a pop-up, instead of affecting agents' current screen. IVR can be configured to transfer calls directly without input from the caller. "The majority of our changes come from customer feedback," Killory says. "One of the main avenues we have for our roadmap is our customer advocacy program," which includes an outreach manager who talks with 3CLogic's 250-plus customers every month to figure out their needs. The release will be rolled out to 3CLogic's customers over the next couple of months, according to their business needs.